Toll Increasing in Occupied Lands : Violence Leaves Mark on West Bank Jews, Arabs

When the Palestine Press Service’s office computer broke down the other day, it was only the first of co-owner Ibrahim Karaeen’s unpleasant surprises.

The second came when his usual repairman, a Jew, refused to make a service call because Karaeen’s office is in predominantly Arab East Jerusalem. Only after Karaeen, a Palestinian Arab, complained to the computer firm’s main office in Tel Aviv did a repairman show up--accompanied by a bodyguard.

“Such a situation in my personal experience never existed before,” Karaeen said later, shaking his head.

But this is just one example of how an unusually violent year in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip has left its mark on both Arabs and Jews.

Israel’s dramatic air raid earlier this week on the Palestine Liberation Organization’s headquarters in Tunisia, 1,300 miles away, also has its roots here, in Israel’s occupied territories.

Officials here said the raid was a direct retaliation for the Yom Kippur murder of three Israeli civilians aboard a yacht in the Larnaca, Cyprus, marina nine days ago. But they also cited a significant increase in terrorist incidents in Israel and the occupied territories as justification for the attack, which killed at least 60 people.

Israeli leaders say that while some of the attacks on Jews here may be individual initiatives, at least half are inspired, directed or financed by the PLO, which they describe solely as a terrorist organization.

While the slaying of the three Israelis in Larnaca was the most dramatic recent incident, the cycle of violence claims victims--both Arabs and Jews--almost daily.

A 13-year-old Arab boy was killed and three other Arabs were wounded last weekend in Hebron by a hand grenade apparently thrown at a passing Israeli army patrol. None of the soldiers were hurt, according to an army spokesman, and the attacker escaped.

Two days earlier, five Jews and two Arabs were wounded when an Israeli bus was attacked by unidentified gunmen on the road from Jerusalem to Hebron. Angry Jewish settlers responded by vandalizing several homes and a mosque near the site of the attack.

And on Sept. 24, a 65-year-old Jewish man shot to death an Arab he accused of harassing him and his female companion in East Jerusalem, near the Old City wall. The man said that the Arab, who had a history of mental illness, had brandished a knife, although police said that they found no weapon at the scene.

The Jewish man was charged with manslaughter and freed on bail. Arab merchants in East Jerusalem shut their shops for one day to protest both the incident and a general clampdown on security in the area.

About 40,000 Jewish settlers live among more than 1 million Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories that Israel captured in the Six-Day War of 1967. Regularly, hundreds of thousands of Jews from prewar Israel travel to and through the territories.

Clashes Not Unusual

It is a volatile mixture, and minor clashes between the two peoples are not unusual. Still, until recently, the tension had been kept more or less under control.

A dozen Israelis have been murdered on or near the West Bank so far this year--eight of them since June 7. The assailants in all cases are believed to be Arabs. Suspects have been captured and formally charged with six of the murders. Nonfatal attacks on soldiers and civilians--with stones, gasoline bombs, hand grenades and rifles--have been daily occurrences.

In the Israeli crackdown that followed these attacks, more than 70 Palestinian Arabs were detained without trial; 21 others were deported.

The military occupation, which had been a low-profile affair, is now painfully obvious, with roadblocks and armed foot patrols seemingly everywhere. Cars are being searched and pedestrians ordered to stand, hands in the air, while their documents are checked.

Streets Less Crowded

The computer repairman who was afraid to cross into East Jerusalem is not typical, but the streets of many West Bank towns, normally crowded with Arabs and Jewish shoppers, are noticeably less crowded these days. On a recent weekday in normally bustling Ramallah, there was not an Israeli in sight.

A few days earlier, Hebron, revered as the burial place of the patriarch Abraham and generally crowded with Israeli and other tourists, was empty except for military patrols.

A Jewish shopper, asked by an Israeli television interviewer if he was not afraid to be in the West Bank, replied, “You just have to keep a low profile.”

It is not just the Jews who are staying home. An Arab resident of Ramallah said: “Today, when you need a pair of trousers or some cosmetics, you think twice about whether it’s worthwhile. . . . Every time you go out into the street, you take a risk of being stopped by soldiers.”

Army Sends Troops

Early last month, the military poured hundreds, perhaps thousands, of reinforcements into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, partly to head off possible clashes between Arab residents and militant Jewish settlers who had begun armed vigilante patrols.

The reinforcements include members of elite units such as the paratroops and the Golani Brigade, who are easily identified by their berets, respectively red and tan.

The settlers called off their vigilante patrols soon after the extra troops arrived. But an army spokesman said that, given the climate, the reinforcements “probably will stay there for a long time.” Sharply increased army activity in the occupied territories has meant increased conflict with the residents.

Young Boy Slain

Three Arabs were killed and at least 24 wounded by soldiers in 18 shooting incidents in the past month. One of the dead was an 8-year-old Gaza boy who was in his father’s car when, according to the army, it failed to heed an order to halt at a roadblock.

In another case, a soldier fired at an Arab bus in East Jerusalem after a passenger threw a bottle at him. Five Arabs on the bus were wounded.

The army said a preliminary investigation indicates that the soldiers in both cases followed proper procedure and fired at the vehicles only after their drivers failed to respond to warning shots in the air.

However, the Jerusalem Post quoted a senior defense source Thursday as saying that soldiers on the West Bank are quicker on the trigger now and that in some cases they have opened fire without justification and have been punished.

An army spokesman acknowledged that the number of shooting incidents is unusual in such a short period of time. But he added: “In general, compared to the large forces that are in the area checking thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, trying to restore order in Judea and Samaria (the biblical names preferred by Israelis for the West Bank area), this is really a small number of incidents.”

Soldiers Investigated

The army has also investigated “almost 100” complaints about allegedly improper behavior by soldiers in the West Bank, the spokesman said.

An army spokesman said last week that an inquiry by the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Levy, found “several cases of irregularities” in the conduct of the occupation troops. But he added, in a prepared statement, that Levy learned that many of the complaints were incorrect and were intended to “create an ugly atmosphere” and make the army’s mission difficult.

Most of the soldiers seem to be as eager to leave the occupied territories as the Arab residents are for them to go.

“This is the first time I’ve been here in 15 years, and I hope it’s the last,” said a reservist named Yigal who is on duty in Hebron. He is a lawyer in civilian life. When a reporter noted that some Israelis go to jail rather than do their reserve duty in the territories, Yigal commented, “I’m not that much of an ideologist.”

Unsafe Duty Stations

Asked whether he would take an assignment in Lebanon or the West Bank if forced to choose, a draftee named Igad, who has served in both places, replied, “Neither is safe.”

Soldiers failed to prevent angry Jewish settlers from vandalizing a mosque and several Arab homes Sept. 26 in the West Bank village of Halhoul, near the spot where unidentified gunmen ambushed the Israeli bus a few hours earlier.

The next day, Fatmah Hassan, a 55-year-old grandmother, showed two American reporters how she had crawled under a bench against an inside wall to protect herself from a hail of stones hurled by the settlers from nearby Kiryat Arba, one of the oldest and most militant of the West Bank Jewish settlements.

A smashed television set stood in one corner of Hassan’s front room, and in the middle of the floor was a pile of dirt, rocks and shattered glass from the scores of broken window panes at the front of her home.

Mosque Littered

At the town mosque across the street, passers-by could look through broken windows and see rocks and shards of glass scattered over prayer mats on the floor.

In Kiryat Arba, Rachel Klein said that she was among the demonstrators and that only a minority of youths acted violently. While she does not defend attacks on innocent people, she said: “The fact is that this kind of action works with the Arabs. . . . This is the only way that calms them down, that forces them not to cooperate with terrorists.”

Klein, who said she has four times been a passenger on a bus that was attacked along the same route, said the damaged mosque is a political symbol that was used “as a cover by the terrorists” who attacked the Israeli bus.

How long this increase in Arab-Jewish tension in the occupied territories will last is anyone’s guess. It seems clear, though, that the long, hot summer of 1985 served to deepen the psychological chasm between the two peoples.

‘Don’t You Dare’

A young Jewish woman named Hannah, a mother and settler in central Hebron, said she regularly shops in the Arab market there. When asked if she had studied Arabic, she said the only Arabic a Jewish woman needs to know is, “Don’t you dare!”

A few hundred feet away, an Arab shopkeeper was asked what he thought about a recent incident in which an Israeli soldier was killed in the Hebron market and another soldier and a settler were wounded.

“Everybody supports it,” he said. “Nobody wants the Jews living here. The two people can’t live together--impossible.”

The military command has announced the arrest of a 20-year-old West Bank Palestinian, who has been charged with the Hebron killing.